I read the news today, oh dear

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, February 5, 2003

This is interesting. It turns out that the Department of Energy, rushing to criticize the University of California for its manifold failures in administering the Los Alamos National Laboratory, ignored the fact that the university had been audited regularly by the Department of Energy. It had signed off on the decisions but developed convenient amnesia when the sheep hit the fan.

It also turns out that an expert National Aeronautics and Space Administration panel had warned just last year that budget cuts imperiled the safety of NASA flights, including the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia. NASA, quick to respond to the report, fired the majority of the members of the panel.

It also turns out that the FBI, searching for the mole who was leaking government secrets to the Russians, spent four years investigating and harassing a senior CIA officer named Brian Kelly. Every failure to catch Kelly in a lie just proved how very clever he was. But the mole was actually Robert Hanssen, who worked for the FBI.

Don't you love bureaucracies? Public or private sector, their primary goal is the same: cover their backsides. It's as though the organization were a living entity, a queen bee that required constant feeding by its swarm of drones. Its purpose is to survive. Sometimes honey gets made too, but that's largely an accident.

Many of us have worked in bureaucracies, and we have seen this dynamic in action. We have met the bureaucratic geniuses, the people who consolidate their power with blind carbon copies and ambush presentations, who move up the organizational chart by paying full-time attention to the organizational chart.

Whistle-blowers get fired because a bureaucracy perceives dissent as a toxin.

What's interesting is that this pattern seems to be a constant; the competence or intelligence of the individual members of the organization is irrelevant. All humans are powerless against the bureaucratic imperatives. The older a bureaucracy, the more it is involved in the entirely circular process of making the world safe for itself.

The city government of San Francisco seems to work along these lines. Employees appear to be involved in an endless dance of finger-pointing. Matier and/or Ross offer a sympathetic ear, so occasionally the battling shapes beneath the blanket are given names.

On Monday we learned that former San Francisco elections director Tammy Haygood, for whom the word "embattled" was invented, was paid $88,135 for not working.

I do wish that when a job that involved not working came along, someone would think of me. Although I have not not worked for some time, I feel confident that I still remember all my old techniques. I think not working is like a riding a bicycle -- it all comes back so quickly.

I am flexible. I can not work in the daytime, or, if necessary, I can not work on the night shift. When needed, I could not work on weekends and holidays. I could not work from home, or come into an office and not work there. I could not wear appropriate business attire except on casual Fridays, when I would not wear a tailored sports shirt and slacks.

Thanks to my broad range of experience, I could not work at a variety of jobs. I know I could not work as the elections director, and I could have underbid the competition. For $75,000 per annum, I could not develop new methods of counting votes.

And when the time came, as it inevitably would, I would enthusiastically fire the watchdogs who claimed that my not working was inadequate to the untask. I would produce extensive records to prove that my sloth was total. All serious offers considered. No smoking preferred.